Do you depend on your computer for your living? If so, I'm sure you've thought long and hard about which hardware and software to use. I'd like to explain why I use generic "white boxes" running open source software. These give me a platform I rely on for 100% availability. They also provide a low-cost solution with excellent security and privacy.

I'm using Jetway's industrial mini-ITX form factored factored with included CPU and GPU (one with VIA C7 and one with Intel Atom 330) that can be switched in-place at very little cost. If ever one gets out of order.

Very high quality manufacture, long life capacitor are used. Not strong horse power, but very stable working and reliable hardware.

Next incarnation will be a cluster composed of AMD Fusion APU with OpenCL GPGPU processing shared amongst the whole system. Of course, I bet it'll be composed of Jetway motherboard due to their reliability :

It's slower than I would have liked, but not unexpected for a device in it's class. The thing that I'm finding is that the little thing runs very hot all the time and the fan's are very loud. It might be a lemon, but many of the reviews are similar.

This was obviously a bundle with a stock jetway case, do you use something else?

I might give them a try again if I knew they solved the fan/heat problem, but given that the one I bought was speced as having a "silent fan", I'd have alot of trouble trusting what they say in the future.

That's the kind of computer I'm now looking for. Sure, not powerful as a Core i7, but for what usage ? I bet that the box heat a little because it's still a dual core 525 plus Ion 2. Even though low power, still the TDP is about 20W or so. I think you cannot make great things to that extend, my mini-ITX baord are not cased at all, and the fan is a little noisy.

That's why I'm looking for AMD APU (like the E450) with passive cooling. Strong enough for desktop usage (LibreOffice) and can decode Full HD streams, play DX11 games (with medium details) etc... Far enough, from my point of with according to my usage.